Another Door Closed
by AndHerNameWasAnastasia
Summary: After closing yet another door in her life, Kori is out to start over. She doesn't get very far, though, before trouble starts up again in the form of a new villain. But this time, it's not just Kori's fight. There are others like her who have been looking for this villain for awhile. With new allies and old, they are determined to take down this person before it's too late.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: So here it is. I apologize for the delay. You see, I did not realize that my family was going to be out of town on my original deadline, so I'm SO sorry for the one-day delay! I hope you enjoy this sequel! If you haven't read my previous story A Woman Scorned, I would strongly suggest you do so before you get into this one, because you will be very ****_very _****confused if you just start this one... **

**So, if you HAVE read AWS, you will, I hope, enjoy reading!**

**-Anastasia**

_Robin looked at her, confused. "I don't understand."_

_Starfire sat on her feet next to him and looked him in the eyes. "I know you want me to go back to the Tower with you." He looked excited. "But I can't. As much as I want things to go back to how they were, I am a different person now, and I can't go back there yet."_

_Robin frowned. "But, even after all this, you still don't want to go back?"_

_Starfire nodded. "It's especially after all this that I can't go back."_

_Robin nodded. "Where will you go?"_

_Starfire smiled. "I'm going to go find my own way home."_

_Starfire hugged Robin and left her room, closing her door behind her, and she passed Bruce, Sami, Tim, and Selena on her way out. _

_Sami was nodding._

_There was a position as Catgirl that needed to be filled._

_She passed the Titans, who were arguing over the last piece of pizza. Only Raven seemed to notice Starfire passing, and she smiled and waved, a sad look in her eyes, but she understood enough._

_Starfire was moving on, away from Gotham, from even more bad memories about betrayals by best friends and leaving loved ones. _

_And when she was ready, she would come back, and she would be ready to be a Titan again._

* * *

Tim

It had been a month since she'd bought an airplane ticket and made scarce. No one knew what her ultimate destination would be, what city in what state, hell, what _country_ she would land in, her eyes squinting as they adjusted to the bright sunlight that they all knew Kori would flee to. If anyone appreciated bright sun and warmth, it was Kori.

They weren't sure if she was still Kori to the new people who would smile at her and make stories with her the way that they all had done. She would be someone knew, that's for sure, since although the community didn't know who she really was (an alien), her face was plastered on billboards and winked at them from magazine covers, and she would have to change her appearance if she wanted to blend, which she undoubtedly did.

They wondered, if she walked in the door one morning, would they recognize her? Would she be a stranger to them, or would there be something they could hold on to about her? Would her hair be that same raven black, or would her contact-carrying eyes still be cornflower blue?

Would she be the same? Would she be smiling or would she be down-cast as she had occasionally been known to be?

It didn't matter though, did it? It didn't matter what they imagined she would be like if she walked through the front door one morning, the kind where the sun was bright, but not too hot because there was a cool breeze that blew the hot air around so it didn't rest in one place. It didn't matter how she might walk through the door because she wasn't ever going to walk through that door. That door, with its ornate lion knocker and its brass knob and its detailed oak carvings, was never going to open for that girl ever again. Not for that girl whom they had no right to claim, that girl who was never really theirs to know anyways. That girl who came into their lives, made them feel at home and no longer alone, until one day she decided this home wasn't good enough for her, with its giant rooms that echo when you talk and its oil paintings of people that none of them knew nor cared about.

If someone were to ask who was missing her the most, they would all fight for the honor. Bruce and Selena would miss her as a daughter, Sami as a long list of missed opportunities that, all collected, formed one tall, girl-like regret. They could've been friends, could've had things in common if Sami hadn't held her responsible for something Kori hadn't even done.

But it wasn't Bruce or Silena. It wasn't Sami. It was Tim who disappeared for days at a time after she left, coming back in a worse mood than when he left. It was Tim who found himself realizing he'd known it all along, known that she wouldn't stay forever, and yet feeling at the same time as if she was being selfish. So what if she had problems? It obviously never occurred to her that other people had problems too. Problems like how it tore them up seeing her in pain. Problems like everyone at Tim's school thought he was a loser and he hadn't been at John O'Donnel's with friends when he saw Kori drive into that bank robbery. He had been alone at a bar stool with a lengthy tab of non-alcoholic drinks while chatting up the bartender. He'd gotten shoved in a locker and he couldn't even do anything about it because if he gave any indication that he was anything but a weakling, people could start wondering where he'd suddenly grown so strong. Even if he was rich, people couldn't care less. Everyone was rich at his school.

So to say he was mad at his adopted sister would be a grievous understatement. She'd always said she cared, wanted him to be happy, yada yada yada. And where was she now? Probably off getting a tan and sipping some cold, fruity drink on the Amalfi coast. He wouldn't expect anything less when you had a limitless bank account and an entire world to explore.

Little did Tim know that his sister hadn't left the country.

* * *

Kori

Her hair was red again, but she cut it to her collarbone so that it tickled her neck in gentle curls. She purchased some thick-framed square glasses to further mask her identity, as well as some green (human green, not Tameran green) contacts. She toned down her fashion habits by trading out spiky heels and designer handbags for boots and a red backpack that she kept everything she loved in. She'd removed one picture from her box, taken during the pre-Kiki era, and had it tucked delicately in the inside pocket. She had a few pictures with Bruce, Tim, and Selena, that she put with her other picture. She had the earrings that Selena bought her, but she didn't wear them in fear that she'd lose one. She had a few changes of clothes in her bag as she boarded the plane, the one that would take her across the country to somewhere she wasn't reminded of her life.

As she walked down the aisle of the plane, she found her seat quietly. It was at the back of the plane, and a window seat at that. She calmly tucked her bag beneath the seat in front of her and pulled out her phone.

No new messages. She knew she shouldn't be surprised, and yet… No. No, she can't be thinking about them now, now when it was too easy for her to just stand up and barrel down that aisle, right back into the manor gates and her family's arms.

As she sat in her seat, she wondered what drove this need to get away that thrived in her chest. It was like a gnawing, breathing thing. There was pain, and then there was this. There's the kind of pain that makes you want to crawl up in your bed and sleep for days, the exhausting kind. There's the pain that spurns relief, the kind that comes with ripping off a bandaid. There's the emotional pain that drives you into the arms of your family, just for some comfort, and there's the kind that drives you away. A pain so terrifying that if you even think about it your mind screams at you to stop, please, stop. That was what she was feeling. It was as much a part of her as her own heart, and even more powerful.

But the thing was, if she let it go, never daring to challenge it, it would never get any easier, and she _knew _that. She was more certain of this than she was certain of where her life was going.

Her morbid inner thoughts were disrupted sharply by a body slamming into the seat next to her. She furrowed her eyebrows as the girlpanted, obviously from sprinting down the aisle, perhaps just a hair short from missing her flight.

The girl was strange. She was tall, taller than her, and skinny. But that wasn't most shocking—it was the hair. Her hair was aqua, the color of a Pacific reef, and it was stick straight, landing just past her shoulders. Her lips were slathered with lipstick in the brightest possible shade of red, and her cornflower blue eyes sparkled with mischief.

The girl thrust a hand in her face. "Hi! I'm Ellis!"

She extended her own hand and Ellis shook it strongly. "I'm… Courtney, Courtney Anderson." Kori pulled her hand from the girl's death grip, but Ellis didn't seem to care.

"So, what's sending you out to the Pacific, especially to a town like Parker?" This girl was clearly not going to sit still any time soon, and Kori sighed, certain that it was going to be one long plane ride.

"I'm moving." The girl perked up at this.

"Really? I live in Parker already! Do you have a place to stay?" Kori assessed the girl's face carefully, unsure if her intentions were of malicious intent. She seemed innocent enough, but Kori was rethinking everything these days.

Uncertain what it was that made Kori trust this girl, she slowly shook her head. Ellis didn't seem to question why Kori was travelling without parents or why she was running off to a mediocre Californian city. Kori was grateful.

"Oh! That's a shame. I can show you around Parker, since I know it pretty well."

Kori said nothing, and Ellis seemed to get the memo, sitting back in her seat and sliding on some white headphones, apparently satisfied.

It was like this for the first hour, but Kori, lacking any sort of entertainment, soon found herself hopelessly desperate for something to do. Anything to keep her mind off of… well, everything.

Luckily, her sanity was spared when Ellis suddenly turned to her with her eyes narrowed. She had a tabloid magazine in her hands, her pointer finger holding a page as she looked between it and Kori quickly.

Kori swallowed, her throat thick. She could only imagine what Ellis was looking at it. In fact, she was fairly certain exactly of what Ellis was gazing intently at. It was her very face, glossy and touched up on some designer clothing ad that was placed in plenty of magazines that were nationally read. To prove her right, Ellis turned the page around to face Kori, and she was attacked by a picture of her own pouting face, a serious amount of makeup caked in a (supposedly) edgy way.

"You know, you kind of look like this girl. What's her name…" She trailed off, clearly racking her brain for a name, one she'd almost certainly heard before. Hadn't everyone?

She found what she was looking for soon enough. "Kori Anders! Yeah, that's her name."

Kori swallowed. "Uh, thanks." Maybe she should have taken more precautions. Plastic surgery could've always been an option, but something told her that a plastic surgeon would easily recognize some very… disturbing abnormalities about her body functions if she went under the knife.

However, thoughts of plastic surgery and gruesome face-changing operations were banished from her mind as Ellis smiled and flipped to another page in her magazine, apparently not catching on to the fact that the girl in the picture and the girl on her right were one and the same.

She let out a breath of relief.

"So, where are you from?" Ellis smiled pleasantly in her direction and Kori groaned, taking back all of her previous yearnings for entertainment.

She fiddled with her fingers. "Well, originally I'm from Gotham. But I wanted a change of scenery so here I am." _Lies._

Ellis nodded. "I was just visiting Gotham for a few days. A good friend of mine got married, so I flew out here for the wedding."

Kori imagined what that would be like. Someone's only reason to flee to Gotham being a wedding. "W-was it a nice wedding?" Good god, she was developing a stutter. Courtney Anderson had a freakin' stutter. Fan-fucking-tastic.

At least her sarcasm was still intact.

Ellis smiled brightly and started chattering on about the wedding. "Oh! It was just _beautiful. _The service was in Rose Park," Kori flinched, but Ellis didn't notice, "and they stood under a white trellis with this beautiful russet gossamer draping over it, and at the end, they released a hundred and fifty white butterflies. Then, the reception was at Field House Briar, you know, the mansion with the winery on the outside of the city, and it was some of the best food I've ever tasted. Some of the best wine, too." Ellis winked. She couldn't be a day over eighteen. "And her dress was just magnificent. She looked like a princess."

Kori almost snorted. She could picture what Dani would say. 'Oh yeah, a princess of the cheesy stereotypes.'

When she caught up with her train of thought, the pain was like a punch in the gut. Normally she remembers not to let herself think about it. Normally she doesn't torture herself with those memories. She'd gotten so good at it to. She'd gotten so good at remembering to forget. But when she let herself get distracted, it was like opening the floodgates. One thousand little nuances about her old best friend stuck like needles in her brain, making her wish she could go back in time. She wished she could just pretend none of it had happened. But alas, her power wasn't time travel. And she couldn't pretend it hadn't happened.

Her thoughts were interrupted violently when the plane shuddered, jostling its contents like dice in the hands of a gambler. The lights flickered and yellow masks dropped from the ceiling.

Kori looked around the plane. People were in varying stages of panic. The more experienced fliers were calmly strapping the masks to their faces, while a toddler a few rows ahead started wailing.

Ellis's eyes were wide as she turned to Kori, her mouth open as if she were just about to launch into another wedding detail.

The intercom crackled. "If you could all please remain calm and place your mask over your faces before helping others, we will have more news on the turb—"

She was cut off by a shriek and the intercom crackled off. Kori breathed heavily, not needing the mask. When she turned to look at Ellis, her face was bare as well, but Kori didn't question it.

She didn't question it when they both launched out of their seats and moved agilely down the aisle, either. Ellis looked at Kori over her shoulder before kicking the door to the cockpit down and running in. Kori was close behind.

What she saw made her heart plummet.

Both the pilot and the co-pilot lay on the floor, their bodies cold as ice, their veins enlarged and darkened. When she touched the pilot's forehead, it was like touching a rock. Ellis was inspecting the flight attendant who'd made the announcement. She was pinned against the wall as if she was held there, but the culprit had vanished. Her skin was the same as the pilot and co-pilot, her mouth and eyes open in a silent scream.

When Kori turned to look out the window, grey clouds broke to reveal a sparkling cityscape below. And it was getting dangerously close.

Ellis and Kori shared a terrified look. They were both thinking the same thing.

This plane was going down.

**A/N: Hehehehehehehe cliffhangers are the . I LOVE EM. So you can expect an update within the next two weeks!**

**-Ana**


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: Here we go, more for you to read, my amazing followers! You all have no idea how much your reviews and follows mean to me, all of you. I'm literally just a fourteen-year-old girl with a laptop and an affinity for writing and popular culture, and you all have made me so happy! Enjoy the new chapter!**

**-Ana**

Kori's breathing was labored as she turned from the dead pilots to Ellis and to the fast-approaching city below. Her heart thrummed in her ears, its beat picking up and stuttering in her chest.

Ellis lurched forward as if remembering something, and held a hand out over the blinking electric steering system. Kori's eyes narrowed as the system suddenly sprung to life, electric sparks the same color as Ellis's hair crackling along the various dials and knobs. Ellis looked back at her with an inscrutable expression, as if she were trying to gauge Kori's reaction. Kori, of course, used to such displays of seemingly impossible power, didn't even bat an eye, and Ellis quickly turned back to whatever she was doing with the electric system.

Whatever Ellis was doing, it was helping. The plane was slowing down, but it was still moving dangerously close to the blinking lights below. Kori knew what would happen if something didn't get the plane's nose pointing upward. They would crash.

Kori took a deep breath before levitating so her hands were splayed on the ceiling of the cockpit, her elbows bent. With another labored breath, Kori pushed as hard as she could against the ceiling. She hadn't tested her strength in ages, and she felt her muscles humming with the strain. The plane groaned with the strength, and Kori increased her force, flying upwards and pushing the plane with her. She felt the nose groan against the wind above, but she could see the cityscape disappearing from view. Ellis watched her with no wide eyes, leading Kori to believe that she was used this kind of thing, ridiculous, supposed-to-not-be-real powers, that is.

Ellis, with her technokinesis, calmly guided the plane out of the city, while Kori held the nose up until the only thing below was a vast expanse of green valleys. Her strength was hardly even waning, but she began to feel the weight in her stretching muscles.

Ellis shot a worried glance over her shoulder when Kori let out a shaking breath. "Er, just keep it up and I'll try to land it in one of the valleys, okay?"

Kori imperceptibly nodded her head. It was ten minutes before Kori felt the plane jolt to the ground and Ellis sighed. When Kori looked at Ellis, the blue-haired girl's hands were shaking and her eyes were glassy. Kori floated to the ground and smiled as much as she could muster. Though Kori didn't know how she did it, Ellis had saved them all. Innocent lives were spared. Unfortunately, they were too late for the pilots and the stewardess.

Ellis inspected the bodies again, her eyes roaming over the porcelain, dark skin of the dead, and pausing at the neck. In the side of the neck, only barely visible, was a hole only about the size of the head of a pin, and it was steaming. Then, before their eyes, it sealed itself and the cold, porcelain skin looked as if it had never been cut.

The two girls shared a perplexed look, before they heard voices floating in from beneath the door from worried passengers. The two silently left the cockpit and slid into the bathroom before anyone could see where they had been. A piercing shriek rang out from what must've been the remaining stewardess, and Kori could practically feel the movement as all the passengers pushed to the front of the plane, trying to find out what the hubbub was about, and Ellis and Kori were able to sneak out of the bathroom and back to their seats, where they grabbed their bags. They hovered in the back of the group, feigning interest, until someone opened the door to the plane onto the vast expanse of green below them.

Kori and Ellis made sure they were the first ones off, and then they disappeared.

They walked in silence among the tall grasses of the valley, their arms swinging and their brains whirring, trying to process everything that had occurred in the last half-hour. Eventually, Kori broke the silence.

"How did you do that? You know, land the plane?" Kori knew it was a redundant question, since she knew very well what Ellis was, but if neither of them mentioned how exactly the plane made it to the earth in one piece, it would continue to hang between them like a wet curtain.

Ellis swallowed. "I'm a technopath, and I have some power over electric energy. My body is stronger and withstands more against disease and… lack of oxygen because I handle electricity so much. But if there's a machine that runs on electricity, I can make it do what I want."

The silence resumed for only a moment before Ellis's curiosity got the better of her. "What about you? You can fly and hold up planes?"

Kori nodded. "I'm an alien."

"So you're from another country?" Ellis had a sly smile on her face.

"Try another galaxy."

"I figured as much."

They walked for hours. They didn't talk much—they were both physically and emotionally exhausted, but once the city they had so narrowly avoided crash-landing into loomed before them, they picked up their pace a little more. The sky was inky black and their stomachs were rumbling. The sooner they could get to civilization, the better off they'd be.

When they finally reached the streetlights, conversation started up again with the lifting of spirits.

"So, is your name really Courtney Anderson?" Ellis asked tentatively, unsure if it was a sore subject.

Kori snorted, shaking her head. "What do you think?" Ellis laughed. "Actually, I was born with the name Koriand'r. It's Tameranean. This obviously doesn't work on Earth, so I changed it."

Ellis filled in the blanks. "To Kori Anders. So you actually are the girl in the magazine. That's quite the life you've got there, alien girl."

This time, Kori laughed, a sound that should've felt familiar, but definitely wasn't. "Well, I couldn't have very well just faded into the background. Inter-galactic travelers happen to attract a lot of attention, especially when they aren't familiar with earth customs. Bruce Wayne took me in, and obviously that meant I would never be out of the spotlight."

Ellis nodded. "I only barely know about Bruce Wayne and his billionaire ways. Parker's a small town. I only just learned what everyone else obsesses with on my trip to Gotham. If there's any place to learn about popular culture, it's Gotham."

Kori nodded. "How far away is Parker from where we are now?"

Ellis looked at the city around them, with its skyscrapers that were so close to being blown to smithereens not too long ago. "Well, we're in Maskinosa right now. That's the nearest city to Parker that I can think of, and it's 400-something miles away. Parker is in northern California, and Maskinosa is in southern Nevada."

Kori groaned. "You have got to be—"

The both of them stopped dead in their tracks in front of a window filled with television sets. The sets were on, the 'Open' sign blinking in the door of the shop, and the light from the televisions spilled on to their slack faces.

A news anchor was standing in front of the grounded plane that they left hours ago, her mouth moving silently, and the camera focusing in on the wreck before returning back to the anchor's heavily made-up face. The woman gestured grandly to the scene behind her, her brown hair blowing in the wind, and red and blue lights swirled near the plane. The passengers all gathered by the fuselage of the plane, and they were being spoken to by a police officer with his back turned. Pictures of the dead pilot, auto-pilot, and stewardess appeared on the screen in the bottom right corner, just above the news ticker, and Kori's heart squeezed.

Those people were real people with parents and next-door neighbors and places they wanted to see before they died, and now they never would. Someone would be crying for them, for their short lives and their shorter deaths. So abrupt—they might not even have noticed before they were gone. Or was it long and drawn out, the decay of their bodies, until they begged for death?

Before Kori could voice any of these thoughts, Ellis sniffled.

"Yeah, I feel it too."

And the both of them turned from the television sets and continued down that empty street.

**A/N: Sorry it was so short, but I'm going through a bit of a block. If any of you are feeling like your idea well has run dry, don't worry about it, because the human idea well isn't actually a well at all, it's the fountain of youth, and with time, new ideas will come to you. Unfortunately, you don't always have time, so listening to music always helps to get the ideas moving! I actually just told a follower, BellyBear01, the same exact advice. You should definitely read Beasty's stories if you're looking for some good TT fanfiction! **

**You can expect another update sometime within the next two weeks:)**

**Happy reading!**

**-Ana**


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